Musings from southern New Mexico

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Owing largely to a dearth of time, my online activities have been limited mostly to Twitter. Today, a tweet I sent as an offhand comment to the proprietor at Balloon Juice appeared in a front page article. This one.

Each alert that someone had “liked” that tweet or “reweeted” it or responded to it in some other way was like a little reward.

When I think about it, though, I suppose that it resembles the bells and flashing lights so enjoyed by the folks at the slot machines in Las Vegas.

In any society that has moved beyond the hunter-gatherer band level of organization, the greatest benefit of society is the sharing of information. To be sure, hunter-gatherers enjoyed the fruits of collected knowledge, but it could be argued that individuals gained more from the group security than from the group knowledge pool. Regardless, individuals in a preliterate society can only even gather what knowledge has been successfully passed along an unbroken line from progenitor to the current generation.

Now, however, a single contribution by a single individual may earn him or her (or, more likely, someone else) vast wealth beyond the kings and queens of old. Do the minor innovations merit tens or hundreds of billions of dollars? No. They do not. I have nothing against the individuals who so profit. Indeed, to shun the potential profits would be foolish. It would be foolish, that is, because the system has been so rigged. If we were to dissect the making of vast fortunes through history, we would see that many or even most were made on the cornering of a market. In some cases, the market was a literal market (such as the East Indian trade or the cotton trade in the time of the sailing ship). In other cases, the a patent or set of patents stifled any potential competitors.

And now we live in a day when intellectual property rights are expanding at an accelerating rate. And the profits for said properties rarely meets the originators. In most cases, the lion’s share of these vast sums go to feed the unquenchable greed of the incestuous packs of leeches at the boards of major corporations. And we forget that even those innovations themselves, be they in science, technology, or art, owe a great debt to all the prior practitioners of any particular pursuit and often others outside it.

In 2008, I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary. That was not because I preferred her to any particular other candidate. The reason was, in the parlance of Mr. Charles Pierce at Esquire, “ratfking.” Since she first appeared on the national stage, Clinton had been the subject of rodent-ravaging to such an extent that it would grow into a cottage industry. Thousands of trees were sacrificed at the hands of the right wing press in this service. Yet she had weathered the storm.

At the time, I imagined that a newcomer such as Barack Obama would be a big risk. A handful of insignificant statements or activities from the past could be rapidly converted into a closet full of skeletons by an increasingly mercenary media corps.

When the admittedly under qualified Senator won the nomination, many embittered Hillary supporters became a part of the informal “Party Unity My Ass” or PUMA movement. I was not prepared for what would happen next. Many of these heretofore ardent Hillary supporters came to loathe the Democratic Party. That’s fair enough. I thought at the time that an unprepared Barack Obama had been lifted out of obscurity to present a fresh new face by a party leadership more interested in marketing than in policy. But that did not change the fact that his claimed positions were very close to many of the claimed positions of Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, the importance of delivering a high decibel “F– You” to the Democratic Party became paramount. Rather than aligning with an ideologically similar person or group, many disgruntled voters chose to actively oppose their own interests.

Now, with a closer than expected primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the so-called “Bernie or Bust” movement recalls the PUMAs. In further irony, those whose support of Clinton was strong enough to bring outrage at Obama’s usurpation now hate her with as much passion or more. They have gone all in in support of even the most clearly insane crackpot ideas proffered by an increasingly unhinged Republican candidate pool. And now we can expect their numbers to be swollen by supporters of a self-proclaimed socialist who would rather support an overt purveyor of fascist ideology. Because Clinton lacks the ideological purity of Sanders, some (supposed) Sanders supporters loudly proclaim that they will vote for Trump before voting for Clinton.

That’ll show ’em.

In a way, however, this may show the brilliance of a seemingly unplanned stratagem. The right has striven to allow overt racism and misogyny in Congress to become so overwhelming that government will effectively cease to function under anyone but a white Christian male.

Jubal Early Bush (I assume that’s what “J.E.B.” stands for, and I’m far too lazy to look it up) has exceeded expectations of all observers. In realizing the inevitable, that is. The slightly less stupid of the impressively stupid Bush Clan wastrel generation has affirmed what those around him have been telling him for years: Bush Jr. not only burned the crops yet to be sewn in the Bush Family farm, but also salted the soil. And probably seeded it with various heavy metals. George P. Bush is destined for the blue blood equivalent* of shoe-shine boy.